Almost 100 years ago, the Hungarian explorer, Lászlo almásycrossing the Sahara desert when he met something inexplicable in a cave. On the walls of the rocks, he saw human figures painted thousands of years earlier that seemed to swim peacefully in the middle of the desert. Some believed that they represented corpses, even souls who flooded the waters of Nun, the primitive ocean of Egyptian culture. Almásy suggested that it was just just a swimming people because Sahara was not always a desert.

Now, the bodies of two adult women, who died about 7,000 years ago in today’s southern part of Libya, provided the first known genetic data for the mysterious inhabitants of the so -called “green” Sahara. The corpses were in mummification thanks to the drought and high temperatures of the area, which allowed DNA to be extracted from the roots of their teeth and some of their bones. The results, published in ‘Nature’ They are really revealing.

14,000 years ago, the glacier era ended and the monsoon rains made all Africa green. The desert was transformed into a savannah covered with greens, trees, lakes and rivers, where they lived giraffes, hippopotamuses and other animals, as well as groups of people who were hunting and collecting.

This is the landscape depicted in the famous rock paintings in Libya’s Tadrart Acacus mountains, which are up to 12,000 years old. In the same area lies the Takarkori, A rocky shelter where 15 corpses have been found, including those of the two women analyzed, along with baskets braided by riverside greens, characteristics of wetlands.

Takarkori

The authors of the study compared the genomes of these two women with those of almost 800 people today and 117 Africans from different periods of the past. The results show that they are not related to sub -Saharan African populations. The closest identification is that of people who lived about 15,000 years ago in Taforallt, Morocco.

One of the biggest mysteries of this period is how these people adopted livestock farming and learned to live from the milk, meat and blood of their animals. One hypothesis is that the “green” Sahara worked as a passage for human migrations that returned to Africa from Asia and Europe, finding appropriate pastures to extend their lifestyle.

But the DNA of Takarkori women shows that these populations remained isolated from the south and north. The origin of their genealogy dates back to 50,000 years ago, when their group was separated from modern people who then left Africa, from which all people descend of this continent.

Takarkori people had 10 times less Neanderthal DNA than modern people outside Africa, but more than the people of sub -Saharan Africa. This suggests that they came from North African populations that have already carried some Neanderthals and settled in the “green” Sahara.

“Our research disputes some theories about the history of human populations in North Africa and reveals the existence of this genealogical line with very ancient roots that remained isolated from the rest.”the co-author of the study said in a press release. Nada Salem, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. “We also show that livestock farming has spread throughout the green Sahara probably through cultural exchanges and not through immigration.”

About 5,000 years ago, the displacement of the Earth’s rotation axis and the withdrawal of the monsoon rain turned the Sahara into a desert again. This caused the exit of the livestock peoples to other parts of Africa and may have been the beginning of Egyptian culture. The Takarkori generation, as it was, disappeared forever. But part of her DNA still exists in populations in North Africa …